A Coen Brothers movie is always a unique experience challenging its audience with these brothers’s singular take on the universe. This time out they have adapted a book by Cormac McCarthy set on the New Mexico borderlands. Drugs, drug money and murder are the themes. Killers in a Coen Brothers’ movie seem to be committed and totally unconflicted about their deeds. They proceed with single-minded purpose.
As Sheriff Bell Tommy Lee Jones not only plays an aging lawman, he looks that part. I date myself when I say that I remember when James Brolin played the youthful junior doctor on Marcus Welby MD but here we see his son, Josh, playing a middle-aged Viet Nam vet; it seems only yesterday he was playing a hunky twenty-year-old in The Young Riders. That feeling of time and events having passed one by seems to inform the movie. Sheriff Bell is a canny old lawman, but he does not understand the new spin drugs have put on crime. Life has passed Llewelyn by, the man lives in a trailer; he isn’t quite sure what he’d do with $2,000,000, but he wouldn’t mind finding out. As the man on his trail Anton is plodding, relentless, and taciturn allowing neither bullet wounds nor broken bones to stop him.
There are no chase scenes in this movie; simply a modern western in which one villain tracks another without passion or remorse.
# posted by garthmailman@gmail.com @ 1:28 pm
